If you’re a tier-1 crypto media sales representative in 2025, chances are you have an impersonator.
These are often fake Telegram, X or LinkedIn accounts offering “Tier-1 PR” to unsuspecting businesses, only to share a personal USDT wallet address when it’s time to pay. Cointelegraph has seen plenty of such cases.
In October 2025 alone, a Telegram profile styled as “Tobias Vilkenson | Cointelegraph” messaged BNB Chain to “set up a time to chat and feature BNB Chain in a Cointelegraph article,” linking to an X account under the same name with more than 6,000 followers. It’s a textbook impostor play: borrowing a newsroom’s credibility, promising coverage and moving targets into private direct messages (DMs) where the scam continues.
Other Cointelegraph journalists, including Erhan Kahraman, Turner Wright and Amin (Ruholamin) Haqshanas, have also reported scammers using their names and photos this year.
It’s not just Cointelegraph: Impersonators are everywhere in 2025
Impersonation has become one of crypto’s most common social-engineering tactics this year: used to steal data, drain wallets and blur the line between trusted media and outright fraud. Here are a few examples.
August 2025: Fake CoinMarketCap “journalists”
Several crypto projects received interview requests from email addresses such as team-coinmarketcap.com and matching X accounts posing as former CoinMarketCap reporters.
Once the “meeting” began, the impostors asked participants to adjust Zoom settings and approve a remote-control request, instantly granting the scammers access to their devices. CoinMarketCap later confirmed the outreach was fake and issued a public warning.
September 2025: The Empire podcast trap
Scammers cloned the branding of the popular Empire podcast and invited influencers to “record interviews” through fake StreamYard and Huddle links. The downloads silently installed AMOS stealer malware on macOS, siphoning browser cookies and crypto wallet data.
April 2025: Hong Kong deepfake officials
A realistic AI-generated video of Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu circulated online, promoting an “official investment plan.” Authorities quickly debunked it and traced the scheme to a Telegram group tied to overseas scammers. Just weeks earlier, a similar deepfake featuring the city’s financial secretary promoted a fake “National Hong Kong Coin.”
March 2025: “Binance support” text scam
Over 100 Australians received SMS messages claiming their Binance accounts had been compromised. Victims were told to move funds to a “secure wallet” for protection, which, of course, belonged to the attackers.
Summer 2025: Fake regulators on the rise
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) received nearly 5,000 reports in the first half of 2025 from individuals contacted by impostors posing as FCA staff. The scripts often began with lines like “We’ve recovered your crypto funds” and ended with requests for personal information or wallet access.
Across all these cases, the pattern is the same: a familiar identity, a quick pivot to private channels and a request that breaks normal process, whether it’s a download, a wallet transfer or a “verification.”
It’s social engineering dressed in crypto branding, and it works because it looks legitimate at first glance. That’s exactly why clear verification steps — checking author pages, domains and official contact links — matter more than ever.
Did you know? In 2024, impersonation (or “impostor”) scams alone were responsible for $2.95 billion in reported consumer losses in the US.
Why is impersonation rising now?
Two big shifts made impersonation explode in 2025.
First, X has overhauled its trusted verification system, replacing it with various monetized tiers for access to premium perks. The blue check no longer signals authenticity: It simply indicates that the user pays for X Premium. The old “notable and verified” badges are gone, and while ID verification exists, it’s optional and inconsistently enforced.
The result is a messy landscape where cloned accounts can appear just as legitimate as the real ones. Some scammers even purchase Premium to make their fakes seem more credible.
Second, impersonation scams are booming across industries, not just in crypto. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recorded $12.5 billion in consumer fraud losses last year, the highest on record, with impersonation cases among older adults rising more than fourfold.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center report lists phishing and spoofing among the top complaint categories. It has become one of the most profitable forms of online crime, and the crypto sector, where everything happens in public and everyone is reachable through DMs, remains a prime target.
It’s not just random scammers; even regulators have been impersonated. In January 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s official X account was hijacked…
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